Despite the abundance of media, we still gain a large share of our understanding about the world through the written word.

1. Elementary Reading

This is basic reading. This is the point at which we pass through the threshold of non-literacy to to beginning literacy. This is the foundation to all reading and these are the skills we generally acquire in elementary school.

2. Inspectional Reading

Inspectional reading places an emphasis on time. This is when we are reading with a time limit in mind. This is also known as skimming or pre-reading.

3. Analytical Reading

Analytical reading is a thorough reading. This is the best reading you can do given unlimited time. This is where you understand the blueprint of the book, understand the arguments, and ask organized questions of what you are reading.

Francis Bacon once remarked “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Think of analytical reading as chewing and digesting.

If you’re reading for information you’ll hardly ever need to read at this level. Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding.

The truth is that phone companies have this data on every customer. I got mine because, in 2009, I filed a suit against T-Mobile for the release of all the data on me that had been gathered and stored. The reason this information had been preserved for six months was because of Germany’s implementation of a 2006 European Union directive.

In Germany, whenever the government begins to infringe on individual freedom, society stands up. Given our history, we Germans are not willing to trade in our liberty for potentially better security. Germans have experienced firsthand what happens when the government knows too much about someone. In the past 80 years, Germans have felt the betrayal of neighbors who informed for the Gestapo and the fear that best friends might be potential informants for the Stasi. Homes were tapped. Millions were monitored.

2. Host my personal RSS reader I recently discovered a self-hosted, web-based RSS client called miniflux that can be installed on a Raspberry Pi. I, as many have, migrated off of Google Reader when it was announced that it would be shut down on July 1, 2013. I was using a program called rss2email for a while to send RSS feed items to my email inbox. However, I wasn’t as happy with that method and I found miniflux after looking around for an alternative to Google Reader and rss2email. miniflux is very simple to set up on a Raspberry Pi. All you need is PHP and a web server program like nginx or Apache.

The Medium ver­sion is Don’t Mess With Them and it’s bet­ter than my ver­sion, be­cause I did a cou­ple more edit­ing passes and tight­ened things up. Also, the pre­sen­ta­tion over there is ter­rific; min­i­mal and very read­able.

The Medium au­thor­ing en­vi­ron­ment is ex­cel­lent, gets right out of the way. Every­thing I wanted to do was easy, with zero learn­ing curve.

The piece was writ­ten on the 26th. I have some tens of thou­sands of feed sub­scribers; it’s hard to mea­sure, since I like the wide-open free­dom of con­struct­ing and serv­ing my own feed. Some of them prob­a­bly read the piece but, since it’s a full-con­tent feed, there’s no need for them to visit the blog. In ad­di­tion, some­thing over 1250 peo­ple came from some­where ex­ter­nal and read the piece.

The Medium ver­sion has had 455 reads.

There’s too much stuff on Medium. My piece got more or less ex­actly zero no­tice until it got pro­moted to the Ed­i­tor’s Picks stream. I won­der why Medium would want to pub­lish some­thing if it weren’t an ed­i­tor’s pick? There are mil­lions of places on the Net to do self-pub­lish­ing.